Last week, we had Quentin Tarantino turning to the exploitation films of the 1970s for inspiration. This week, we have Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) and Jodie Foster – of all people – turning for inspiration to that other 1970s genre of forbidden film delights, the vigilante film.

You could argue that films like Death Wish were more despised – at least by critics and liberal commentators – than the I Pull out Your Eyes and Wee-Wee on Your Grave type of films that Tarantino wants to resurrect. For the classic vigilante films celebrate the spectacle of revenge and retribution. They are the hardcore porn of the payback film. Needless to say, The Brave One doesn’t go that far. It denies the audience the primordial pleasure of watching human “scum” blasted from the mean urban streets in an almighty cleansing rain of hot lead by an avenging angel. The Brave One is Death Wish with a brain; a thoughtful and gripping study of revenge, fear, violence, grief and, most of all, loss.

Unusually in this genre, the killer is not a man, but a small, slim, vulnerable woman called Erica Bain (Foster). When we meet her she has a wonderful job as an upmarket talk DJ, presenting Garrison Keillor-like essays on her beloved New York. She’s madly in love with her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews). But their happy future together is destroyed one evening when they enter Central Park and are viciously attacked by three tattooed thugs. David dies, Erica survives – but her old self is gone.

That hole in her heart and in her life is now filled with fear. She buys a gun for protection. This gives her the courage to leave her flat and return to work. One night, in self-defence, she kills a man in a corner shop after he shoots his wife. Before long, she kills two other men. Erica discovers she has a taste for killing, and is horrified. But that doesn’t stop her from going out on the hunt. Soon stories spread that New York has a new vigilante on the block. An honest, play-it-by-the book detective, Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), starts to track her down, and a cat-and-mouse friendship develops between cop and criminal.

Curiously, The Brave One has turned up at a time when New York has never been safer. “The safest big city in the world,” Erica says. So, is the film confronting a post-9/11 fear of sleeper cells or 1970s-like urban scum? I suspect it’s merely addressing the fog of fear in which we can all get lost at any time, in any city. It’s a tale of moral metamorphosis; we watch Erica become a killer, a creature who stands for everything she is against. But Erica’s transformation doesn’t quite work dramatically or intellectually. You never sense she has gone over to the dark side. And the idea of moral equivalence – that once she starts taking the law into her own hands, she’s no better than the people she kills – is unconvincing. This is partly the fault of the screenplay: two of her killings are in self-defence; one is an act of retribution on behalf of someone else; the other is pure revenge. She does not kill for sheer pleasure, unlike her victims. And they are so uniformly horrible that having her blast away these monster men leaves no room for moral or emotional ambiguity on the part of the audience.

Okay, Jordan has shot the film, so it’s unlikely anyone in the audience will be cheering when Erica takes out the trash. But will anyone outside of the American Civil Liberties Union and the British chapter of Amnesty International watch Erica shoot a man who threatens to sexually violate her with a knife and think: “What an egregious violation of that poor man’s civil and constitutional rights.” I doubt it.

Yet this goes to the moral heart of the story. For this is a film about a woman looking, not for revenge, but for her self, the Erica she used to be, a woman sickened by who she is becoming. But Jordan never makes us share the moral revulsion Erica feels for herself. She looks in the mirror and sees Charles Bronson; we see poor Erica.

What redeems this flaw, and the film’s numerous plot implausibilities, is Foster’s wonderful performance. We haven’t seen her in a big dramatic role that really had some power to it since The Silence of the Lambs. There are moments when she talks about her loss – of David, of her New York, of the woman she once was – that are deeply moving. No, the vigilante film isn’t back, but thankfully Jodie Foster is.

(18, 121 mins)

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